On the phone in the quiet coach

(Names have been changed to protect the guilty)

Last week on a Virgin train to Birmingham, someone was on the phone….

“Oh hi yeah can I speak to Jane Davenport please. It’s Andrew Price. Thanks.

JANE! Hi, it’s Andy… Andy Price… it’s Andrew Price, I’m covering the Black Sofa concert in Birmingham tonight? Black Sofa? It’s a band. No it’s not a sofa contest, and they’re not black. We’re trying them out, I think they’re brilliant.”

He goes on like this. Another call, brags to his friends Alan, Blake and Piers about how he was just chillin’ with Jane.

He then lowers his voice, but because he’s been SCREAMING, his lowered voice is merely what we can hear, rather than what we’d been assaulted with. He is driving everyone in the coach to distraction, but no-one says anything. I start plotting.

He rings Steve. “Steve mate, can you retrieve my emails from your computer for me? My login name is the usual format for Universal employees, and the password is las revinu – it’s ‘Universal’ backwards. Clever eh.”

I’m sitting across the aisle from him, doing the crossword, and writing all this down.

In Birmingham, I get to the hotel, get on the computer. I Google Universal and find their email format. Login as andrew.price@universal.com password lasrevinu and at two am email Jane Davenport.

“Dear Jane, Well what a disaster. I was so wrong. They were terrible. All the effort this company has put into Black Sofa is wasted, just like I am actually, wasted that is! Ha ha ha! Seriously though Jane I think we’ve been duped, we’ve been taken for a ride. Although I wouldn’t mind taking you for a ride any day! From a distance Jane you know you’re not half bad looking. Anyway must go, feel my curry’s having an effect. Love ya! Andy xxx”

The next morning I log on with an anonymous email address and copy this email to Andy, with the accompanying message:

“Hi Andy, I sent this to Jane last night. I suggest you get round to Universal straight away. I’ve also sent copies to Alfie, Blake and Piers. It’s cool. Just explain that you shouted out your login details on a train for all to hear. As Abraham Lincoln once said. Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt. And in future Andy, in the quiet carriage of the train, keep your voice down, there’s a good lad.”

That's what I could have done. If only I had...

2018

2018. Google Brain Implant Spells Death of Pub Quiz.

Tim Bentinck © 2011

A child born after 2000 has no concept of what the world was like pre-Google. Not so much pre-computer, but specifically pre- the instant ability to find the answer to almost any factual question, almost without thinking about it. No-one’s thick or bright any more - you just dip your head to the screen, tap it a few times, and there’s the answer. The need for learning has passed. The accumulation of knowledge, that has been the driving force of civilisation throughout its history has been made redundant, because everybody knows everything.

And in 2018, at the present rate of progress, Moore’s Law[1] dictates that we will have a brain implant that we communicate with by thought alone and that answers us as a soft sound in our ear and an image on our retina, and is permanently hooked up to the net, and, because it’s Google Plus v.6.5, it doesn’t give us a choice, but finds the most pertinent, the most interesting, the cheapest, the best, the most profitable – for you. Because it knows you. It knows all about you.

And if this becomes so, which it must do, what then? What value school? What value learning? What would be the point in cramming facts into young heads? Why should we ‘know’ anything? An exam question that demanded knowledge would be pointless. The very word ‘knowledge’ would cease to have any meaning. Is this the end of education?

Well I hope not, and I don’t think so, but it is absolutely certain that education will have to change to take all this into account. It does mean that everything will be different. The fundamental problem though is that this database knowledge, this accessed knowledge, this ‘ask and you shall get’ thinking is passive. It is only found when asked. It does not reside in your memory when you make decisions, it does not inform your choices based on things you know.

But if the eleven-year-olds growing up like this in the next decade learn as well from the questions they ask their implanted selves as my generation did from reading books and listening to teachers, is there really much difference, as long as they remember what they find? The job of the teacher will be to give a structure to this ‘self-learning’, to give a strong outline of the reference points of every subject and let the student find the facts and figures by themselves. Making relationships between facts will be the key, and whether, given that power, they’ll bother to remember it.

When a University student, lying on their back in the park with their eyes closed, might be editing a movie, reading a book, writing a novel, finishing a spreadsheet, socialising, paying a parking fine or having sex, and doesn’t understand the concept of what life was like before that, we have entered a different world where the only role a teacher can play is that of the inculcator and organiser, the one who tells them what questions they should be asking, from birth.

If this is not a meme in 2011, it will be soon.

---

[1] The number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years

Isoworg Speech

Just to finish off this whole re-appraisal of my father's book, here he is giving a speech to punlicise the book in Trafalgar Square on July 18th 1971. In order to create publicity for the novel, he 'invented' the International Society for World Government and attracted three hippies and a few passing tourists, oh and a nutter.

His speech lasted half an hour and I recently found a recording of it on reel to reel tape and transcribed it. It's my Pa. Highly articulate, persuasive and way ahead of his time. The World Government he describes could be the EU today. The latter half of is spech is what he was really about though. He warns of the coming ecological disaster and is so correct when he predicts that the message of people like him, seen in 1971 as green fringe nutcase, would come to be seen as mainstream orthodoxy and people who deny it would be seen as 'the enemy'.

As I say, it's half an hour long, but worth a listen. The first 15 seconds or so are distorted, while the recordist plugs the mike in, but after that it's pretty clear.




It's a good name anyway, so I've renamed my web design service after it.

www.isoworg.com

Isoworg

I knew my father was always ahead of his time, but the Wikileaks phenomenon has made him seem even more prescient. I now realise he invented the Internet, the iPhone, Facebook and Wikileaks - in the late sixties!

In 1971 he published a book called ISOWORG, standing for the International Society for World Government. Its spy hero, Thorne, was able to ring a telephone number which was answered by a computer that spoke with his voice, thought as he did, behaved as he did, but was wired up to a collection of computers around the world that contained the sum of mankind's knowlege. Don't forget he was writing this in about 1967!

"The world's going to get more crowded, more heavily armed, emergent nations more ambitious. No assembly of men could ever be sufficiently competent or sufficiently objective to handle such a problem and the penalty for failure is annihilation. A computerised administration could do it. Isoworg is building up the most powerful computer in the world. It will be able to handle all the information and problems which would occur in the context of a world government. It has memory banks which contain all the information to which you could refer if you knew where to look. Plus, of course, a great deal that it acquires from its own resources. All Isoworg operatives are linked to it, linked together, in the same way that you will be if you join. This means it know what's going on in the lives of all other agents simultaneously. Also, the extent of these memory banks is almost unlimited. You will, as I said, have instant recourse to most of the world's available knowledge."
"How does it work?" asked Thorne.
"It works according to a new principle. Imagine a dish of acid. In one corner is an electrode connected to a wire. All the information about you gets coded into electrical impulses and fed through the wire into the electrode. This causes a growth to occur on the electrode in the acid - it looks like a fern. The more information that is fed in, the more the fern grows. Given your compliance, it will learn you totally - whims, weaknesses, experience, knowledge, the lot. It will grow and become what you are. It will be your alter ego."

So when the Internet started, he, quite rightly, used to jokingly boast, 'Oh I invented that', which, in theory or concept, he had.

The other thing I'd always known, but had thought absurd, was that Isoworg's agents were dedicated to finding every country's state secrets, and publishing them to the world! Their agents were therefore enemies to everyone and would be tracked, hunted and killed by alliances of otherwise mutually hostile governments. For Thorne, read Assange!

"The purpose of Isoworg is to glean top-secret information from all countries and publish it to the world, because secrecy breeds suspicion, suspicion fear, fear tension and tense people press nuclear buttons. It's not only military information, it's political, scientific, trade secrets - anything that inhibits world-wide free intercourse and development."

And the iPhone? Here's how Thorne communicates with his computer:

"There." She pointed to an object like a cigarette case. "It's a mini two-way radio. You can talk to it whenever you like. You can sit and talk to it for the rest of your life, I should think."

I wrote an In Memoriam website after he died, and there's a description of the book here.

It's actually on sale here at eBay too.

Microsoft rant

This is a rant while I wait for Office 2010 to roll back the installation it had nearly completed until it found a folder it couldn't access and therefore couldn't continue and the folder is protected so you can't delete it so you have to abandon the installation. It then can't find files it needs to un-install and comes up with "Error 1712 - we screwed up, no sorry, just piss off, we can't be bothered to write a sodding error trap and fix to get you through this."

Hey, Bill, the point is this: I just made a clean install of Office 2007 on a new drive - two weeks ago. I'm now upgrading to Office 2010 (don't ask, it's a long story). And IT WON'T DO IT!!

I mean how much do you have to pay a Microsoft employee, for a product that retails at about $600, to writing the effing code, to make sure that you can always install the bloody thing. It makes me see red. I could write the code to do that, and I'm an amateur. What is going on??

I have struggled with PCs and Microsoft since they started. I fix people's computers, I'm a bit of a geek. Here I am in 2010 and Microsoft can't even write an installation program that anticipates and solves problems. Give me strength.

OH. OH. Now get this. I go to Add/Remove programs to remove Office 2007 and it tells me "The language of this installation package is not supported by your system." It's ENGLISH you American tossers, what the hell do you think it is!!

Ok so now I'm running the FixIT file that uninstalls Office 2007. IN DOS!!! So why ON EARTH isn't the online FixIT file IN THE INSTALLATION PROGRAM???? Why do I have to go and search for it? You know, you get to think of this rubbish as normal, but I bought a Mac last year and oh boy. The loveliest thing in the world in Finder - you can find any file, instantly, anywhere. Bliss. And the rest. Years of my life have been wasted staring at progress bars.

DOS. Der. I should have deleted the folder in Dos. Kuh.

Boris Biking Day One

I spent all today on a Boris Bike.

Registered yesterday, £45 for the year, less than yesterday's return rail fare to Birmingham to do an episode of the Archers. Key arrived this morning, registered it online before going to work, bus to King's Cross, crossed road, put key in slot, had a bike! First 30 minutes free, biked to Soho, didn't have to take saddle off, find lock, find key, attatch bike to pillar, worry that bike would be stolen - no, just went CHUNK into a slot and strolled round the corner to do a voiceover for Jaguar sponsoring cricket.

Sashayed out 20 minutes later, put key in slot (in pouring rain), cycled gently to Knightsbridge to have much needed haircut, CHUNK, not my responsibility any more, ate sushi from Waitrose sitting on a wall (this bike business has got me on a fitness thing), had haircut, got bike back, went to Victoria to meet old friend from America, drank beer, reclaimed bike, drove up Mall, up Tot Ct Rd, turned right onto cycle lane city then, triumphant with new found excitement and fitness, just needing to ditch it at King's Cross to get bus home, couldn't find anywhere to dock the bloody bastard thing. In three different places, all the docking places were full, despite my brilliant iPhone app that told me they were free. Teething prob here - in the evenings, it will be impossible to find a docking station free near any of the mainline stations unless they make some more. Big it up for Errol from Maintainance who was pulling out a duff bike as I arrived at my last ditch docking port (this is beginning to sound like Star Trek). Top man Errol.

Observations.
It's great. I have spent years bicycling around London and it's always been a hassle. The difference with this is that you've got a big London Transport roundel on the front and as such you're not a pesky cyclist, but a sort of one-man bus. In bus lanes I could sense Buses and Taxis giving me more respect. I know they loathe 'cyclists' - I've got an HGV licence and I know how difficult it is to negotiate people on bicycles driving a large vehicle. I can re-assure regular cyclists however that you don't pass that test until it is seen that you have a hyper awareness of cycles and pedestrians. The HGV test is akin to the idea of Noblesse oblige - "I know I'm the bigest thing on the road, so I don't, like some dickless midget in a BMW, have to keep trying to be, so I will be aware and considerate." Taxis slightly less so, but they too spent years getting the Knowlege and are to be respected. Buses I am never sure of, because their drivers vary from the absolutely brilliant, to the psychotic and lethal.

Also, when I used to ride my own bike, I felt that bicycle lanes were somehow an affront to my independence - I don't need some interfering, health and safety pedant telling me what part of the road I should wobble in - I'll go where I like - I'm free!!

Well I'm 57 now, and I totally adored the sturdy, sit-up-and-beg, London Transport, little bit of London, pootle down the cycle lane, ignore the driving rain, feeling sort of Dutch, stopping for the traffic lights, getting where you want to, CHUNK and walk away-ness of it all.

I had more conversations with perfect strangers today than I've had for years. Everyone was giving me the thumbs up, having a chat, 'What's it like?', laughing, 'Brilliant!' - if I'd been single I would absolutely have pulled.

Finally. 'Boris Bike". Ok, I know that it was Ken's idea in the first place, and good on him for that, but it really is a good idea and it will become as much a part of London as the double-decker very soon. What would we really rather its nickname was, a Boris bike or a Ken bike? I rather feel that if I'd ridden round London today on a Ken Bike, I might have encountered a girl on a Barbie Bike. I saw four others today on, to give them their true name, a Barclays Bike, and none of them were wearing helmets. I know it's dangerous but I was born in 1953 and spent my whole childhood on a bike -AND I'm pootling in a green cycle lane. I'm a Londoner. I like this freedom. It's more Boris-ish than Ken-ish.

Educating Rita

After two months at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury I have finally finished Educating Rita. What an experience. Here's what I wrote at my nadir in the second week of rehearsal:

Well tell you what ol' darlin, this is the real bleeding deal!

It's like being in the army, or at least back in school. Three weeks on camp. My morning commute takes one minute, ten seconds exactly. We rehearse all day, have a meal in the pub, and go to bed early, learning lines. On Wednesday I had had totally sleepless night, not a wink, don't know why. The next morning we did a run of the whole play, when my mind was a thing running along behind my body, trying to catch up. It was just like the actor's nightmare. At one point I thought I actually couldn't carry on, I felt ill, panicked, and brain-dead, but my futile look of pleading only got a prompt and I carried on somehow to the end. Simply not at the races.
You can't do it on no sleep.
That night I drove to the all-night pharmacy at Sainsbury's, which, thanks to my new mobile dongle on the computer, I Googled my way to, and bought something called Nytol on recommendation of others. Watched movie in bed, didn't feel at all sleepy, although totally zonked and wet from having fallen in bog when having crafty fag in the moonlit nature reserve opposite our little house. Took another Nytol. Slept like I was in the arms of angels for nine hours. Salvation.
Today we ran it for the first time in front of the production team, our first audience.
It hummed. It flew. Instead of just surviving we were telling a story, playing the laughs, really talking to each other, feeling the emotions.
AT LAST!!!
I had reached rock bottom and actually said to myself out loud, 'whatever made you think you could do this?'. Serious panic for a bit. Still face prospect of actually doing it - and matinees! Twice a bloody day!!
However I am disciplining myself, have lost weight, have cut back on the booze, am working with this quite wonderful girl, Claire Lams, whose Rita is a force of nature. Keeping up is fantastically exciting. Running with it, like we did today, is still scary, but when it works it's just fantastic.
What's really nice now is going back to the script, and re-learning it, learning all the sense, and without the panic.
I haven't worked this hard for a very long time.

That was then. Six weeks later it was playing to packed houses and standing ovations. I'll miss it in due course, but just now the luxury of not having to get nervous every night is just bliss!

Here's a taste for those who missed it:
www.newburytoday.co.uk/News/FlashNewsPlayer.aspx?articleID=11385&CategoryID=